Networks, Netflix, And What Makes 'House Of Cards' A 'Hit' Show In Today's TV Landscape

Netflix isn't saying how many people watch "House Of
Cards," so what makes it a "hit" show?House of Cards/Netflix

If you live somewhere with easy access
to Variety or an I-95 exit, it might be
impossible to imagine finding somebody who hasn't heard of (or
hasn't sat, bleary-eyed, ingesting the entirety
of) House of Cards, the sleek and entertaining
political drama on Netflix. According to YouGov's Brand Index, a rough measurement of
pop culture attention, the quantifiable buzz around Netflix
reached an all-time high last weekend, when the second season
premiered.

But how many people actually watched the show?

Netflix doesn't share (and doesn't care about) live audiences,
and neither do its advertisers, because there aren't any. So
rather than rough Nielsen figures, we have to go by even rougher
broadband analytics. But here's our best guess: "Anywhere from
6-10% of subscribers watched at least one episode of House of
Cards," Procera Networks found, and in the U.S., "the average
number of episodes watched during the weekend was three."
Fascinatingly: There was no appreciable increase in
Netflix’s overall traffic.

Given that Netflix has just under 30 million domestic
subscribers, that means that two to three million people
watched House of Cards in its opening weekend.
(A previous Procera estimate went as high as 16 percent of
Netflix subs, or nearly 5 million.)

Two million, three million, five million people. Whatever the
real number is, that's an impressive audience for a streaming
network supposedly cultivating a long tail of entertainment. But
is it an enormous audience for a supposed "hit" show?

Approximately 115 million households own a TV and about 100
million pay for a cable subscription. So we should expect typical
TV audiences to be higher than Netflix. NCIS, the
Navy-police juggernaut that attracts its gray viewership like
boomer catnip, draws an absurd 17 million viewers a week. But
compareHouse of Cards to an average show on a
broadcast network. According to Nielsen, CBS ended last year with
an average prime-time delivery of 12 million nightly
viewers.

It's awkward to compare streaming estimates to Nielsen estimates,
but it seems safe to say the average CBS program
has at least twice
times as many viewers as House of Cards.

There are a couple interesting points to make off this
observation:

1. Popularity is weird.

Popularity has become both easier to measure and harder to
measure at the same time precisely because there are so many
metrics. The most essayed-about show might
be Girls. The most tweeted-about show is,
statistically, Pretty Little Liars. The most
talked-about, right now, is House of
Cards. But the most popular show (which is barely
essayed-about, rarely tweeted-about, and hardly talked-about)
is NCIS, whose audience is literally as big as
those three other shows—combined ... times
two.

In a wonderful essay on this, our age of
pluralist popularity, Adam Sternbergh wrote, "we’ve turned off
Top 40 and loaded up Spotify; we’ve clicked away from NBC and
fired up Netflix." Yes and no. "We"—Sternbergh, me, and everyone
we know—might have clicked away from broadcast. But even stuck in
what appears to be structural audience decline, CBS still pulls
down ratings that make Netflix hits seem like quaint
Acela-corridor niche series. The sliver of pop culture we've slid
under the media microscope bears little relation to what's
sampled by the rest of the country.

2. Netflix and HBO are lucky...

Netflix and HBO need original programs, because their catalogue
of movies and TV shows doesn't differentiate them sufficiently
from Showtime or Amazon. But on a show-by-show basis, it
actually does not matter how many people
watch House of Cards (or True
Detective). And, indeed, far fewer people do watch them than
we'd imagine.

Broadcast networks, however, need massive audiences to watch
their shows because they live and die off adjacent advertising,
which is priced in viewers. Netflix and HBO aren't selling
eyeballs. They're selling subscriptions. They don't need to
obsessively target the throng assembling daily to gobble up crime
procedurals and zombies, and it's no coincidence that the
programs selected to please a small, educated audiences are
celebrated by the small, educated TV writers who ignore what
everybody else is watching.

3. ... broadcast is not lucky.

The mega-cable bundle—that is, the regular cable
package plus premium channels like
HBO plus over-the-top services like
Netflix—supports a pluralistic audience by allowing different
channels to specialize in different audiences. According to
conversations I've had with network executives, this has a
trickle-down effect, as networks seeking specific audiences build
specific reputations that become crystallized within the artistic
community. Showrunners selling boomer-candy crime procedurals go
straight to CBS; writers of juicy romantic dramas go directly to
ABC; complex story-lines attract bids from AMC, HBO, and Netflix.

The outcome is sort of weird. Pop culture critics, who tend to be
attracted to the thing that's most popular, mostly ignore the
most popular shows on TV, which are lower-brow fare crafted to
get high ratings. Meanwhile, a handful of networks whose business
models rely on subscriptions rather than advertising amass all
the most-talked-about shows on television. And that's how the
people reading about TV and the people watching TV live in two
separate worlds.